Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

In 1978 I thought Bill Gates trying to sell BASIC interpreters for what was 90% of the cost of the computer to run them was a pretty stupid idea :-)

That said, one of my VC friends defines an Entrepreneur as someone who can take a stupid idea and make it successful. Sort of an homage to the whole idea that they can see something you cannot.

These days when I'm confronted by this sort of proposal I ask the person making the proposal to describe the world where their idea has succeeded. What is different about that world from today, and what is the same. What do people do in that world that they do differently now or can't do at all. And perhaps more importantly what do they do today which they no longer have to do.

If you can paint that picture in enough detail you can figure out who is going to be working against this person and who is going to be cheering this person on, you might get a sense of how much work is between here and there and the kinds of people needed to do that work. And if you know this person well you might be able to guess whether or not they are up for that, or perhaps more importantly, committed enough.

I thought bottled water was idiotic "Who's gonna pay that for water ? ! ? Gone in six months." And phone sex lines. "1.99$ first minute, $.99 each additional minute? Please!" In six months their rates doubled. Business models can be hard to judge.

This one hits home. 25 years ago I zigged into the water filtration business when I should have zagged in the bottled water business. I had the choice and never saw that businesses would pay so much to have water trucked to them. Doh!

Both of those are very well-studied business models, though:

1. sell to the lonely and impulsive who are willing to trade money for attention (Also see: therapists, people who run cons on the elderly, everything else involving real interaction with a woman in the sex industry); additionally, take advantage of the sunk-cost bias to keep people after they would have otherwise "passed their limit" (Also see: casinos)

2. run advertising campaigns that separate the world into "good/beautiful/healthy/upper-class people" and "bad/ugly/disgusting/lower-class people" by which kind of products they use, then position yourself as the most convenient/eminently-consumable product in the "good people" product class. (Also see: deodorant, diamonds, hybrid cars)

can you give any example for deodorant? I mean I know diamonds are bullshit and hybrid gas cost equally much to produce as to use oil, but deodorant? If you don't use it, you stink, right?

If you take shower once a day (and after sport), you do not stink so much compared to a smoker.

Er, well throwing in "compared to a smoker" is a bit of a cheat... but body odor depends a lot on the person. I've known some people that could go ages without showering and still seem (and smell, even in close proximity) as fresh as a daisy, but others that always seemed to have an obvious, er, presence, daily shower or no.

true...if you talk to telecom hardware guys who have been around long enough, they will tell you most of the innovation that supports a whole lot of PBX/BPO/call center infrastructure happened thanks to the initial market created by those phone sex lines.

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